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Matthew Thurber: I am from Lummi Island, Washington State. I had an idyllic childhood, I guess. I spent a lot of time in fantasyland making up movies in my head in the woods. I read a lot of books. At school we danced the Mexican Hat Dance and had a story reading hour where the kids would lay their heads on pillows. Everyone had a fave pillow – mine was a sort of hospital-like white cotton wedge. My school bus driver was a Zen monk. All 50 kids in school sang 1920s show tunes to piano accompaniment. The Phillips boys introduced me to new wave, Dungeons and Dragons, and Monty Python. We made lots of videos in the WWII, Vietnam, or comedy genres. My nickname was "Matty-Bob" or just "Bob". Salmon barbecues and bluegrass music… very idyllic. Later I commuted on the ferry and on the bus past fields of cow shit to a shitty high school. There were some good teachers: Steiner, who played banjo in class, and Smedley, our language arts teacher. School was stressful and confusing but also wildly exciting. I got out of that and went to community college, then I moved to NYC.Do you remember the first comic you ever read? What is the evolution of your comics readermanship?
Peanuts, then Bloom County and Far Side collections, then Tintin and Asterix, the Smithsonian collection, also Batman and Spiderman, then Elfquest, Conan, Archie, then darker Batman, the Killing Joke, Arkham Asylum, wearing a black trench coat and a chaos symbol pin, Doom Patrol, Edward Gorey, R. Crumb. Then in high school, reading Raw while wearing necklaces made of typewriter parts and a Rastafarian-style hat, underground comics, Butthole Surfers, music/art/collage/dada type interests… Pettibon, 19th century stuff, Aeon Flux, onward and upward with the arts. Then I went to college and took in a lot of other data but was still reading Ben Katchor, Dame Darcy, Tony Millionaire, Yummy Fur, kind of found out about Fort Thunder, Rege, Marc Bell, etc. around 2000…
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You know how all the Ikea products have funny Swedish names? Slumra is a bedspread or something. This comic was inspired by several recent trips to Ikea. I kind of like it, it’s cheap and attractive. The table I am typing on was born there, but we built our own bookshelves, dammit!Do you see Slumra as a continuing strip or is the end of this story that people are buying really cool-looking tables with faces on them?
I don't know. It’s the end of Slumra because he gets decapitated by Ikea and they steal his ideas for designs on their products. I like using architects as characters because architecture is an art practice I find really preposterous and possibly harmful or inhuman so maybe I will come back to Slumra.Did you see the new David Mazzuchelli book? The main character is an architect who designs things that can't get built.
Egads, scooped by Mazzuchelli!Possible Slumra sequels: Great Slumra's Ghost, Son of Slumra, Slum of Slumra, Summer of Slumra and Slamra: Slumra Goes Punk.
I'd like to do more with Handsome, Ikea's new CEO.Besides being a comicker you are also a bit of a rocker. It seemed like Soiled Mattress and the Springs was getting a lot of positive attention and then the band disappeared. Tell me the story of that band.
Soiled Mattress was an instrumental music band that evolved when Peter Schuette and I, who had previously been making keyboard music and multi-media performances together as Furniture, started playing with Aviram Cohen. I switched to sax, we started writing muzak-like songs, we went on tour with No Age on the East and West Coasts, and also in England. We put out two EPs, still available from Teenage Teardrops, and a CD on Upset the Rhythm. We always tried to add a bit of vaudeville magic to make the instrumental numbers more fun, such as playing along to projected videos, playing in swimming trunks with a beach ball, guest bongo players or tap dancers, dancers dressed as ducks, playing with a homemade volcano, playing with a balloon that would be levitated into the air during the climax of one song. Meanwhile, I had no job and was very stressed about being in a band and having no money, trying to survive on freelance work. This could not go on forever and the band was broken up. Before doing so, however, we drank a pint of one another’s blood and vowed to be "BFFs".
Ambergris is an ambiguous band with varying membership where the stories and lyrics are the most important factor. In the past I have performed with scrolls and props helping to illustrate the content of the songs. Ambergris played its first show in 2003 and continues today as my main musical outlet. It’s good to keep one toe in showbiz because I love to perform for people and tell them stories right into their ears, accompanied by what in my mind sounds like toe-tapping bluegrass music, though it could be just a shittily played, out-of-tune baritone ukulele.
1-800-Mice is partially my attempt to "adapt" the movie Serpico, at least to think about the metaphysical ideas underlying the movie. Serpico interests me because he is a traditional shapechanger figure; his skills are mythical, he's like coyote or some other kind of trickster god who can disguise himself. He goes undercover in order to be the best, most effective cop he can be, because he believes in the system and in morality, but then he realises it’s all upside down. Because of his natural sympathy, he sort of turns into what he is mimicking, a counterculture person. It makes me mad that kids these days are so reverent of Tony Montana, but who really is like any other warlord. Imagine how great it would be if everyone was wearing Serpico t-shirts instead of Scarface or wearing disguises.
